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Am I Drunk?

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Am I Drunk?Weird Reasons You Got Tipsy So Quickly You arent pumping iron.Of course, your size would affect how quickly you absorb alcohol—picture a petite sororitysister versus a hulky male linebacker. But the percentage of your body fat to muscle massplays a role too. Because alcohol is more soluble in water than in fat, a 150-pound personwith more lean muscle mass (who has less fat) will be less affected by the same number ofdrinks as a 150-pound person with more body fat. Youre eating low-fat or fat-free foods.It’s no secret that imbibing on an empty stomach makes your drink go to your head (literally)faster. But even eating low-fat or fat-free foods can alter how drunk you get. Foods with ahigher fat content take more time to leave the stomach and can slow the rate at which yourbody absorbs the alcohol from your digestive tract, according to the National Institute onAlcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. If you can, opt for those bar nuts—a great source of healthy,unsaturated fat—over the low-fat pretzels.

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 You mixed your drink with diet soda.Your blood alcohol level will spike faster if your cocktail contains diet soda compared to regularsoda, according to a small study recently published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical andExperimental Research. In two different sessions, study participants drank the equivalent ofthree to four mixed drinks in a short period of time. When they drank vodka mixed withregular soda, their peak blood alcohol level measured 0.077, just under the legal limit of 0.08.But when they drank vodka mixed with diet soda? Their blood alcohol measured 0.091. Theirperception was altered, too: After drinking diet drinks, people performed statistically worse oncomputer tests compared to how they did after sipping the regular version, even though theyreported no noticeable change in how they felt or performed. You chose a curvy glass.How well you “pace yourself” during a cocktail party may have to do with your glass. Studyparticipants drank twice as slowly when their lager was in a typical “straight-sided” glasscompared to when it was an angled “beer flute,” researchers at the University of Bristol foundlast year. The findings suggest that it may be harder to judge the halfway point of your drink inshaped glasses, according to Science Daily. You liked how your drink tasted.Flavor itself can affect behavior, Scott Krakower, MD, medical director of the MineolaCommunity Treatment Center, told HealthDay News. When you want a drink, just a small tasteof it can activate your brain’s “more please!” reward system and trigger the desire to drinkmore. In recent studies at Indiana University School of Medicine, researchers gave a group ofmen just a half ounce of low-alcohol beer, their drink of choice. Based on the beer flavor, thesubjects reported an increased desire to drink more than compared to when they sippedGatorade. You were psyched to have a good time.Itching for a fun night out with friends or your spouse? You may get “drunk” more easily.Perception plays a big role not in how drunk you actually are, but in how drunk you feel,according to ABC News. People have begun to act drunk when they were told there wasalcohol in their glass even if there wasn’t any. Likewise, when people won’t act as drunk whentheir drinks are spiked with alcohol if they aren’t aware of it. Youre getting older.The older you get, the more easily you become intoxicated, thanks to a number of physicalchanges in your body. One is the decrease in the metabolism of alcohol in your digestive tract,and a decrease in body water. "Older people can be snowed by alcohol amounts that hardlytouched them when they were younger," Peter Martin, MD, director of the Division ofAddiction Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center told ABC News.